THE HOUSE ON THE RANGE

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 23, 28 January 1939, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE HOUSE ON THE RANGE

By--K. M. Knight

For Women

THIS is about the house on the range. It sounds as if it ought to be one of those hill-billy songs that come over the radio, but it isn't. It is about a simple house, inhabited by simple people, and furnished so simply that anyone would wonder how there was anything in it to write about. Yet when I went into that house and saw how white the kitchen shelf was scrubbed 1 saw not one article but a whole book —and more; a whole library of books that could lie written about houses that are home*, although they be but two room?. Imagine this house if you ran. Tt was built 011 about an acre of cleared land: the other .">0 acres was still in standin'j scrub. It had a back door, but no front one. There was a small stove, a piece of board that acted as kitchen bench, ironing board, washboard, carpenter's

bench and so on. It was white witli 1)0i scrubbed. Above it was a window —an ordinary window. It didn't open, but would one day. You wouldn't look twice at the window, because after the first time you wouldn't see it at all. You'd be looking through it. Beyond those clear, shining panes were ranges, iind it was a summer afternoon with a south wind and a cloudless sky. ou went to the door to get a better view of those hills. The sunlight flooded in across the new board floor. There had been a burn, and the air was spicy with smoke and that after-fire scent. The ground around the house had all been ~;ig. It smelt of roots, and growth, and just a pure earth smell. So you

sat on the step with your chin in your hands and imagined that you, too, owned such a home—two rooms a long way from any where—bare floors, unlined walls, no furniture except two chairs, a rough table, a few boxes and a big bed. What is it that stirs in one's heart at the sight of such a place? No conveniences, no neighbours, nothing that civilisation has wrested from the raw. Only the primitive earth, the sun and the fresh wind, and those eternal hills so blue along the skyline. And yet it is a moving sight. Xo smooth green paddock smiles to the sky; no polished floor to the ceiling. There are only acres of sweet-scented scrub and the smell of burnt tea-tree and fern. The little house is bare, even of comforts. But it is alive. It seems to be somehow at the beginning of things, while so many homes to-day are at the end of them. And a house is like a journey or a story—it is more interesting when it is just beginning than when it is ending.

So many nations—in fact all nations —must have started like this. Our ancestors knew what it was to clear earth of its unprofitable growth, and to exploit its possibilities. They lived in little houses they had built from timber felled by their own hands. They looked at bare walls within and at blue hills without. They worked with primitive tilings and they created a world. It is so long ago that we have forgotten. But sometimes it comes back to us. We may be sitting on a new doorstep looking towards hills, or inside a small house learning where the cupboard ifl to go when the rain comes and the husband cannot work outside. But with the scent of new-built wood, or the scent of new-turned earth, it will surely come— this nostalgia, this primitive urge to build, to create, to battle with reality, to live near to our long-lost mother, the earth: and to gain her smile of approval in crops of green smooth grace, and the shadows from cool trees.